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The Salt Lake Tribune
Press
/ Sep 21,2023
Cromar’s Contributions to Utah Air Quality Board
Improve Environmental Conditions and Public Health
Director of Health, Environment, and Policy, Kevin Cromar, has served on the governor-appointed Utah Air Quality Board, which has statutory authority for administrative rulemaking in the state, since 2017. While the actions of regulatory boards typically represent a collective effort, Cromar’s service on the AQB has directly improved environmental conditions and public health:
- Addressing Climate Change in a Conservative State. Cromar has been pressing state and agency leaders to allocate additional resources to identifying and applying for federal funds available under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. The first fruit of this effort is EPA’s recent announcement of $74.7 million awarded to the state under the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant, to support transportation, solar-power generation, oil and gas methane-emissions reduction, and assessments and efficiency upgrades to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions across multiple sectors. With Cromar’s encouragement, the proposal makes direct reference to EPA’s updated social-cost-of-carbon estimates in explaining the cost-effectiveness of the greenhouse-gas-emission reductions in the plan.
- Managing Ozone Pollution in State Implementation Plans. The Clean Air Act requires states that fail to meet federal air-quality standards for ozone to submit State Implementation Plans (SIP) to reduce ambient pollutant concentrations; SIPs require a demonstration of reasonable future progress of emission reductions for ozone precursors. Cromar reworked the board-approved SIP, asking EPA to allow for combined reductions in both NOx and VOC, rather than focusing exclusively on the latter, thereby reducing ambient-ozone pollution. The Air Quality Policy Section Manager at the Utah Department of Environmental Quality noted that “Cromar constructively collaborated with staff to amend the [SIP] language and make it stronger for EPA to use their discretionary authority to work towards the collective goal of improving public health. He has been an excellent policy expert on our Air Quality Board, and we have greatly appreciated working with him over the last seven years.”